With the Investment Readiness Level, you now have a way to quantify the progress of a product, project, or company help you make investment decisions, whether you’re a team leader, manager, or investor.

HOW TO USE THE INVESTMENT READINESS LEVEL
Where is the project, product, or company in its lifecycle? Like all of the tools in this book, the IRL is designed to allow for a rich, strategic conversation, in this case, using a common set of metrics – related to the business model of the project, product, or company in question – as the basis for the conversation.

The IRL is also a prescriptive tool. Regardless of where your project, product, or company is in the design process, the next milestone is immediately clear.

Many project leads, product managers, and entrepreneurs only care about launching the next product or giving a great presentation or demo. When employing the design process however, they should be focused on maximizing learning.

How many interviews, iterations, pivots, restarts, experiments, and minimal viable products did they go through? What did they learn from that? And how did that influence their decisions? What is the evidence backing up their next step?

Whether they’re giving project updates or presentations to investors, when using the IRL the focus should be on how they gathered evidence and how it impacted their understanding of the underlying business models.

The Investment Readiness Level provides a “how are we doing” set of metrics. It also creates a common language and metrics that investors, corporate innovation groups, and entrepreneurs can share. It’s flexible enough to be modified for industry-specific business models. It’s part of a much larger suite of tools for those who manage corporate innovation, accelerators, and incubators.

Source : Design A Better Business